Sunday, February 1, 2009

Animated Zonal Mean SST Anomalies

In this post I tried to determine if animating Zonal Mean SST Anomalies would reveal anything of value. It might, but if it does, it's not readily apparent. I've also run a side-by-side comparison of the 82/83 and 97/98 El Ninos (not posted) and while it does show the similarities and disimilarities (caused by the El Chichon eruption) of the two events, there was nothing eye-opening. This is my first and last venture into animating Zonal Mean SST Anomalies.

Scrolling farther down, the data for the zonal mean graph is provided if you click on “Text” on the line “Download the zonal means plot as PDF or Postscript or text file”. I've used that data to create an animation of Zonal Mean SST anomalies.

The animated Zonal Mean SST Anomalies from 60S to 65N (outlined in red in Figures 1 and 2) for the months of January 1976 to December 2008 are illustrated in the following video. It’s based on an 11MB gif animation file that's been converted to AVI format. It runs fast, but it will be slowed considerably in future posts (and divided into shorter clips) when I look at the zonal mean SST anomalies for individual events such as the 1997/98 El Nino and its aftermath, or the combined effects of the 1982 El Nino and the El Chichon eruption, or a comparison of those two El Nino events.

NOTE: From January 1976 to November 1981, GISS used HADSST as the SST dataset. The titles of those graphs contain the note [Source: GISS/HADSST]. In December 1981, GISS switch SST datasets to OI.v2 SST. The titles of those later graphs are marked only as [Source: GISS] to differentiate between the two.

Comment Policy, SST Posts, and Notes

Comments that are political in nature or that have nothing to do with the post will be deleted.####The Smith and Reynolds SST Posts DOES NOT LIST ALL SST POSTS. I stopped using ERSST.v2 data for SST when NOAA deleted it from NOMADS early in 2009.

Please use the search feature in the upper left-hand corner of the page for posts on specific subjects.####NOTE: I’ve discovered that some of the links to older posts provide blank pages. While it’s possible to access that post by scrolling through the history, that’s time consuming. There’s a quick fix for the problem, so if you run into an absent post, please advise me. Thanks.####If you use the graphs, please cite or link to the address of the blog post or this website.